Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

“I’m making a kosher ham.” Socorro said keeping a straight face for a long moment before breaking up. Reluctantly, Joshua laughed, too. “I really should—but Mother is bringing her own food.”

And her own dishes, Joshua added silently. But her joke had broken Joshua’s mood.

“I already told Kevin to pretend he doesn’t know Grandma.” She was so smart. Nothing to do about Harlow, though. He couldn’t keep a secret, not at three.

But then, his father would ignore his grandchildren as he had ignored his own children, so he probably wouldn’t notice. What could children know? What could children offer? They weren’t old enough to talk seriously about God.

“Why? Why did you call him?”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“I know just the something, too,” he offered as he returned to the bed.

Joshua helped the frail, old, so suddenly old, man out of the front seat of the car. He felt so light, so brittle. He might break if dropped. Certainly, this wraith could not hold much power over him anymore.

“You see,” the old man said—the same voice, pitched slightly higher, squeaked, “what it is to throw over your God.” No “Hello, Son,”—he hadn’t spoken Joshua’s name in twenty-two years—no hello of any kind, nothing but God first, and the lecture.

“Oh, Pop.” Joshua hated himself for reverting to a phrase he hadn’t used in years. Still, he could not hold onto the anger he had held for years. The old man was too pitiful a sight.

“You have heard, of course, the stories!” The old man walked on his own, but Joshua’s mother walked close by, with one hand ready to reach out and steady him.

“This must be Socorro,” she said. Always the diplomat, always willing to step into the fray, even when her husband would side with Uncle Morry. “And Kevin and Harlow.”

Kevin said a simple, “Hello,” smiled obviously behind his hand, and tried not to laugh. Harlow chirruped his glad welcome in a language which the old man would not grasp, would not try to understand. His father, the redoubtable Benjamin Yosevs, simply did not listen to children. His own or people’s.

“We brought our own food,” Benjamin informed Joshua, pointedly ignoring Socorro. Socorro shrugged a smile at Joshua. Her body told him, “It’s what I expected.”

Joshua was not happy to have to endure the rituals before eating. Kevin kept asking questions with his eyes and body. But his father was a guest and would not have eaten otherwise. The meal itself was anticlimactic. His father ate in stolid silence. Just like dinner at home, the same, the same slow torture.

After dinner, Joshua helped his father to the sofa in the living room while Socorro and his mother stayed in the kitchen with the boys. Joshua sat in his own chair, but he did not recline it.

“The visions—you have them, too?” The old man looked at Joshua with a puzzled expression.

“Too?”

“What did you see?” his father asked.

“See. Hear. Smell. Everything. Massacres, pogroms, murders, mass executions.”

“Names?” the old man asked quietly. “Did you receive names?”

“No. What do you mean, names?”

His father smiled painfully. “You may receive names. You will. You must act when you do. You must.” He was as serious in this as in anything Joshua could remember. He slumped back into the sofa when he finished speaking. Old, Joshua thought. He was so old. In the ten years he had aged, gone from a vigorous seventy to this.

“Why? What did you see?”

His father grimaced noticeably, took a deep breath. “It is very distressing. I was no Joseph. I could not tell a true dream.”

“I know.” Joshua did know what the old man meant. He wished that he wouldn’t couch it in such Biblical terms. Everything had to come from the Bible. His own visions had seemed real—in certain ones he had verified certain facts. But still, he could not, would not say they were “true.”

“Tell me of the last one,” his father said, leaning forward again, “the first one and the last one.”

Joshua told his father about the early pogrom. His father nodded his head but kept silent as Joshua struggled with the words. He told him of the machine-gunning in the ravine. When Joshua finished speaking, his father sat back onto the couch to think. He closed his eyes and tipped his head forward onto his steepled fingers. A gesture which had not changed in ten years. Except for the exceptional thinness of the fingers and the liver spots on his hands. His father did not speak for many moments. This also had not changed. Joshua remembered having to tiptoe around the house while his father thought with his eyes closed. He didn’t rest his eyes, like Uncle Morry, just thought with them closed.

“The first one I recognize,” his father said, leaning forward. “It is the same as the first one I had. In Poland. The last, I did not see. It sounds like Babi Yar. In the Ukraine.”

“Could be,” Joshua said.

“And the others?” his father asked. “Are they sequential? Do they follow a pattern?”

“A pattern through time, yes, but there are gaps. Do you still have them?” Joshua asked.

The old man leaned back in the chair. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.”

The simple statement brought chills to Joshua’s neck. The way to God. He had not thought of God at all in any of this. Jew, yes, he had been forced to think of Jews, but not of God. He had not thought seriously of God since—he did not know how long. The God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament—his father would have gone through the ceiling if he heard Joshua say that. The Holy Scriptures! They are not Testaments—an old implies a new. That, and “B.C.” “B.C.E.” was all right—before the common era. The old man had his little ways.

The Old Testament God. The God of Vengeance. Was he suffering the Wrath of God? Bruce Silverstein in Hebrew class used to mock: there is no God and Jesus is his son, there is no God and Mohammed is his prophet. With no God how could there be a Wrath of God?

Benjamin huddled into himself and wept quietly. The way to God. Denied the way to God. This was enough to make his father cry. Joshua felt the distance between himself and his father as if it were a solid object. A solid, brick wall. His father had sought the way to God ever since Joshua could remember. And he had been denied. While Joshua, the apostate, had been rewarded. What kind of God was it that would do that to His believers?

Joshua did not know how to react to his father’s tears. He wanted to console the old man but knew the resentment that would follow.

“In 1916,” the old man said without raising his head, “in a vision of awful clarity, I was given the name of the little Austrian.” Hitler—his father never called him anything but “the little Austrian.”

“What?”

“I did nothing about it. At the end of the vision I was told what to do—where to find him during the Great War, and how to kill him. But I did nothing.”

“You were only thirteen at the time,” Joshua said.

“It was my first vision of the future, of atrocities that could have been prevented, and I did nothing. Thirteen was old enough.” He stared at the ground. “Old enough. Thirteen is old enough to be a man. And later, that chance was gone. The little Austrian lived—and six million Jews died. Six million.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Joshua said.

Benjamin looked up at Joshua. “Yes, I could have. I could have changed everything.”

Everything. Changed everything. The words reverberated in Joshua’s head. Everything. He had seen—and done nothing.

“Did you ever change the future?” he asked his father bluntly.

“Ah,” the old man replied, raising his finger stiffly to make his point, “the import sinks in.” This was the same gesture he had seen his father use in making a thousand points. The Talmudic finger.